Nobody knew better than I that the past casts a long shadow, but this didn’t seem like the time to say so. Instead I shrugged, hoping I wasn’t about to make another mistake. But then my life is one long list of them, so what’s one more between friends?
“Put your coin on the night table,” I ordered.
To my surprise, he complied, but then he’d all but admitted to exhaustion. I wiggled sideways until my knees touched his. This close I could smell the faint citrus of his Burberry Touch cologne, and I felt the same pleasurable shock he must’ve experienced at discovering the frangipani on my skin. I’d bought it for him, that same trip to London. Touch wasn’t as expensive as some of his others; he liked Higher Dior and Dolce & Gabbana’s By, but he stopped wearing them. A year and a half later, he was still wearing Touch because I’d liked the way it warmed up on his skin.
Swallowing trepidation, I put an arm around him and he nestled into me as he always had. I was supposed to be comforting him but my face wound up in the curve of his neck. His arms came around me so hard it hurt, and with my hands on his back, I felt the tension coiling him like a spring. He probably hadn’t slept in days, not since his mom vanished. With all my heart, I wished he’d come because he needed me, not my gift.
But then, if that had ever been true, I might have stayed.
“This is what I was asking for.” My hair muffled his voice, along with the unprecedented admission. “This. Don’t let go tonight, Corine. Please.”
I didn’t.
My eyes burned with tears I refused to weep, and I swam through memories all night, long after I soothed him to sleep with finger-walking on his spine. In the morning, my right arm felt numb and my ribs were sore from lying in one position, but he looked a little better. I didn’t speak as I went to wash up.
Quickly I scrambled some eggs and we ate those with the last of my tortillas and salsa. I scraped the leftover rice and beans into the trash and then bundled it up in a tiny plastic shopping bag. Chance raised a brow at me but I didn’t explain. He caught on when I dropped it in a white decorative basket outside the shop, hung high to deter the dogs.
He grabbed his backpack and I shouldered my overnight bag, stuffed with five changes of clothing. If we stayed longer I’d need to find a Laundromat, but I no longer fretted about such things. Once I worried about wearing the same outfit twice in a week, but living here had persuaded me nobody gave a rat’s ass what covered mine.
“Where are you parked?”
“There.” Indicating a black Suburban maybe a block down, he set off.
I followed, fighting the odd sensation that someone was watching us. I paused, glancing down the street both ways, but I saw nothing out of place. Nothing to convince me it wasn’t paranoia. But if Chance had found me, so could someone else, and there were a number of people who would like to see me dead. Some were even crazy enough to do it themselves.
In morning light, Calle Jacarandas looked a little shabby. Doubtless it would look worse to someone accustomed to sanitized American cities. In addition to all the bars and grates, the adobe and stucco buildings held grime, though people fought it with flamboyant paint. On my street alone, you saw azure, mandarin, golden-rod, sienna, violet, and rose hued houses.
But there were more trees and flowers here too. Mexico City was one of the greenest urban sprawls I’d ever seen. My neighbor had a garden I envied: a huge noche buena tree with big glorious red flowers, native frangipani, rosebushes, hydrangea, and a wall full of bougainvillea. As we walked, I tried to see my life through Chance’s eyes and eventually gave up as I clambered into the SUV.
We were quiet as we drove. I guess he was thinking about what waited for us in Laredo, but to my surprise, he didn’t need directions to find the periférico or to get back on the federal highway that led north to Monterrey. I brought my map, just in case, because I hadn’t explored the city much beyond the barrio where I wound up.
He shrugged, correctly interpreting my astonishment. “I drove around here a bit, looking for you.”
I didn’t ask how he’d found me. Using his gift, he’d have stumbled on someone who knew about my shop. That was how it worked . . . and why he didn’t use it lightly. An unscrupulous person would turn such strange luck to any number of bad ends, but Chance had always used his power over coincidence with great care. I felt a flicker of remorse that I intended to warp it in pursuit of my mama’s killers, but not enough to change my course.
Chance bitched beneath his breath at the other drivers while we got out of the city. Maybe I should’ve warned him people here considered a red light a suggestion and that they thought nothing of turning left from the far right lane. Still, the Suburban meant he had a lot of weight to back up his vehicular threats and most folks gave way.
The demarcation from city to country came sharply, and the wide open spaces carried a remoteness you find nowhere in the U.S. Even the likes of Montana and Wyoming don’t compare to the vast empty stretches on the way to Monterrey, which sits on the southwestern Texas border. Laredo is about two more hours away from Monterrey, and I hoped he didn’t intend to try to do it all in one day. My ass protested the thought.
The mountains are starkly beautiful, but you can go a hundred miles between gas stations with a grazing goat as the only sign of life. Tequila farms lay here and there along the highway, and far off the road, I imagined I saw smoke rising from a distant chimney.
Driving from Mexico state to Nuevo León on the carretera nacional covered a lot of territory. Earlier this year, I read how a dispute between two Tzótzil Indian families over a pothole escalated into a full-blown shoot-out, resulting in four fatalities. It isn’t rare for guns to settle arguments, particularly in poorly policed indigenous areas; the modern world with a deputy parked behind every road sign to catch you speeding doesn’t exist out here.
“It’s a little scary, isn’t it?”
I exhaled, remembering making this drive by myself. Even so, I’d been glad to leave the border towns. “Yeah. Anything could happen out here.”
Though I didn’t say so, anything could happen when we reached Laredo as well. Adjoining Nuevo Laredo via International Bridge, the town is a shithole, and I wished Chance hadn’t let Min join him there. Then again, he probably didn’t know about the warring cartels turning the place into a charnel house. Thanks to their private war over the I-35 route, which exploded at the intersection of Paseo Colón and Avenida Reforma, the murder rates there rivaled those in DC.
It took the intervention of the Mexican army to break up that fight, but I doubted this was common knowledge for the average American. I knew of it only because an overly informative U-Haul agent offered the news when I passed through, along with a warning to get my ass out of town. And this was where his mother disappeared.
I smelled something burning.
On the Road Again
For once, it wasn’t merely my nose for trouble.
After Chance pulled off to the side of the road to investigate the reason for the dashboard light coming on, I climbed out to stretch my legs. I wandered around while he tried to figure out how to open the hood. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but trees and mountains narrowly cut by the well-kept highway. Hard to believe we were only an hour out of the city. For about a minute, I managed to hold my tongue and then my sense of humor got the best of me.
“Let me guess. You didn’t check the fluids before we left?”
His head jerked up, his outraged look priceless. Chance did not see to such things. He paid people to see to such things, but he would’ve had a hard time making himself understood at a service station, so I popped the hood myself. Some steam billowed out, verifying there was a problem, but damned if I knew what it was.
The radiator looked intact, and it was beyond me to examine anything else. If we were just low on water, I could walk to one of the roadside spigots, but if the truck needed replacement parts, we were in a world of trouble. I didn’t bother checking my cell; the mountains f**ked with reception out here and who would I call anyway? We’d be lucky if a truck driver picked us up within a couple hours.
“Don’t turn off the engine,” I told him. “Let it cool off while it idles. I’ll walk back a ways and get some water. You stay with the Suburban and check the back to see if you have any spare coolant.”
“You want me to make you a sandwich too?”
“Turkey on rye,” I said over my shoulder. “Lettuce and tomato, no onion.”
I found an empty container and set off, grateful we hadn’t gone too far past the last water stop. Highly ill advised to drink from the highway taps, but for a vehicle in trouble, they were a godsend. Chance startled me by laughing, audible a hundred feet away. I turned and gave him a quizzical look.
“You’re so great,” he said. “I’d forgotten that too.”
What could I say? I just kept walking. I sweated, the sun beating down on my head as I reflected how blue the sky is so far from civilization. Later I tried to refill the engine’s water reservoir. Let’s just say Chance didn’t think I was so great when I cracked the engine block.
To his credit, he didn’t rant, just pulled his backpack out of the truck. I had the good sense not to say anything since I’d teased him about not checking the vehicle. It seemed like we were even on catastrophes. So we leaned against the Suburban in silence, tired and thirsty, waiting for a ride, as we’d done for the last two hours.
Finally, someone stopped for us, but his cab was crowded and I rode for several hours on Chance’s lap. If he’d made a comment about his legs going numb, I would’ve clubbed him with my straw handbag. The trucker took us as far as San Luis Potosí, where we arranged for the rental company to reclaim the Suburban. I didn’t want to bitch, but we’d wasted an astonishing amount of time, and we were only around halfway to Monterrey.
So a few hours on the road, a few hours beside the road, and another few hours on Chance’s lap. It was well into the afternoon by the time we sorted out another ride. This time Chance got a Toyota with precious few amenities, looking pained as he slid his credit card across the counter. Mostly, I hoped the vehicle was reliable.